The Outbound Mac Clone

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Date: Sun, 23 May 1999 03:12:55 -0500
To: Classic Posts <classic-post@hitznet.com>
From: Michael Thibault <michael@CAM.ORG>
Subject: Re: New Outbound

My late-night brain-dump on the subject of the 125, one of which sits in a
corner of my room...

The processor is a 68HC000 running at 15 MHz. (The NoteBook series used
various versions of the '030 chip, and are consequently faster and more
expandable). The ROMs are from a Plus or an SE, depending. I haven't tried
putting the ROMs from my SE/30 in their, but was once tempted to try those
from a Classic...

You can boot the Laptop from a RAM Disk, which can save wear and tear and
make things pretty peppy, especially startup. If you happen to have some
30-pin SIMMs lying around, you can add them to a second bank of 4 SIMM
slots inside the 125; apparently it is possible for the Laptop to have a
RAM Disk ("Silicon Drive") of 1 to 16 Megs, in addition to the 4 Megs
(maximum) of main memory. (The manual seems to suggest that you can throw
in 'any combination' of 256k, 1M, or 4M SIMMS, but that seems  a bit
odd...) I never tried anything more than a 1 Meg RAM Disk. Unfortunately,
I've heard that a large RAM disk is a vampire for juice, and you should
take precautions against leaving the thing uncharged and/or unplugged for
lengthy periods, especially if you aren't familiar with the character of
your particular main battery.

There are three batteries in the ensemble: the main battery (lead-acid
video-camcorder battery, likely available through a Radio-Shack-like outlet
;) for ~$40US), the keyboard battery, and a backup battery in the main
unit, in its little crib beside the lead-acid video battery. The backup
maintains the RAM Disk when you are switching batteries, or when the main
battery is depleted - and it will do so valiantly until it is completely
exhausted. The keyboard battery is specced as a SanyoCR12600SE 3 Volt
Lithium, but you can apparently use two 1.5 Volt Ns instead - especially
nice to know given how hard the lithium may be to find.

You should be aware that the external floppy drive (which probably can be
intalled internally in place of the small hard drive) most definitely does
not like to have anything in its mouth when you shut down the computer - or
crash; the diskette will be either permanently unreadable thereafter or you
will have to run disk recovery software such as NU on it, on another
machine. You can, of course, read, write, and format Mac and DOS diskettes
with the floppy drive, provided DOS.INI is active in your System Folder
(see below).

The floppy itself is not a Sony diskette drive, as typically found in Macs;
instead, it's a tarted-up PC diskette drive - which explains the eject
button, which you should use liberally, but only after dragging diskette
icons to the Trash. Similarly, the hard drive is not SCSI, as far as I can
tell, but an IDE or MFM drive (PrairieTek 20 in mine, IIRC). There are no,
or extremely limited, expansion options as far as the hard drive goes; your
40 Meg drive is probably the largest you can get for the Laptop. But who
knows...

There are a number of pieces of the puzzle I've never seen: apparently you
can connect the Outbound to a Plus (presumably ROM-less) with the
appropriate cable and card, using the "Host Connector Port", which is
located next to the two serial ports on the side of the machine, to take
advantage of the Plus's monitor and RAM. God knows why. There is, or was, a
mouse that plugged into the keyboard. Never seen one. Instead, I used a PC
mouse, courtesy Serial Mouse Driver, and a little hardware hacking. The
IsoPoint thingy just didn't feel right for me; I like a mouse tanked up on
caffeine.

The User's Guide refers to "a hidden built-in programmer's switch" but
doesn't state explicitly how to drop into the debugger - a useful thing to
know, since otherwise the only way to restart is to push the LCD monitor
over onto its back, then to right it, and start again from the keyboard.

You can run System 7.1 on the Laptop, but you'll need a purpose-specific
set of diskettes to install it. These links, not recently-checked, may lead
you to the special system diskettes required by the Laptop. If strictly
necessary, I can dig around...

http://www.cris.com/~comug/outbound/welcome.html

http://www.cris.com/~comug/outbound/index.html

Contrary to what I've read on one of the 'classic Macs'-oriented sites, the
Outbound is not Australian in origin; instead, it seems, it came from
Colorado (Boulder, maybe).